A hype free curated Movie and Music Review blog from the Websnacker and Crew. Plus Irreverent Commentary, Slice of Life Vignettes and Random Incisive Thoughts on Culture, Travel, Design, Marketing, Activism, Environment, Men, Women and Everything else in between. Besides every now and then, a healthy dose of sparkling Music and awesome hard to find Movies - for FREE!

Hear Now

Manifesto Existenso

Social Provocateur, Blogger, World Traveler, Cinephile, Music Collector, Marketeer, Photog / Lensman, Web Bandit, Anti Capitalist, Ghost Writer, Tastemaker, Misread Critic, Bootlegger, Design Geek, Green Activist, Futurist, OpenSourcer, Optimist, WebDJ and Curator of this Blog - at the Crossroads of Life! And an avid collector of Cinema and Music - have a personal collection of 15000+ Movies, 50000+ music tracks and much more. Send a request and it will be granted! Read More..

Legal Mumbo Jumbo

All the content - Music, Movies, Reviews, Articles and other stuff here are for your personal reading, hearing and viewing only. It has been gathered from around the world and is honestly meant to promote the original artists/creators so please don’t trip out. The Websnacker Blog simply acts as a tastemaker - a broadcaster letting you discover great content, hear fresh music and see amazing movies usually not covered by the mainstream media - an eclectic experience to see the world in a different perspective. However, in other words, if you happen to be one of the fancy pants that owns the copyright to stuff that you see here and don't agree with this act of goodwill, let me know and I will gladly remove the links as fast as you can say a Hip Hop, Be Bop, Don't Stop. Chill! Still waiting for an Alien Invasion!!!

Copy Wrong

Unless explicitly indicated, all content here has been either authored, co-authored, produced, directed, composed, mixed or ghost written by the blog authors. Every effort has also been made to credit (and trace) the original copyright holders and if you're one among them, our most sincere apologies for the omission. Believe the Websnacker, its all in good faith so simply write in and it'll be set right in a presto. And to explain these totally impure actions, lets also quote Wilson Mizner and Stravinsky - "If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, its research!", "A good composer does not imitate, he steals". Peace!

Friday, April 20, 2012

Destination Moonbase - Alpha was the pilot for Space: 1999 and a Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds) production - perhaps the cheesiest sci-fi TV series that ever was. And I watched them all last week on a DVD induced trip to 70s-80s Sci-fi nostalgia.

Anyway, we all know the premise, right? A celestial catastrophe knocks the moon out of orbit and Moonbase Alpha’s 311 crew are cast drifting in the "dark galaxy of the universe" for four or five seasons. The first episode already dangles a frustrated hope of salvage for the rundown moondwellers - a spacecraft called a "swift" filled with the crew’s friends, family and lovers visits the base, and the castaways are told that a contingent of rescue spacecraft is on the way to fly them back to Earth at speeds exceeding that of light. But everything is not as rose-colored as it seems.

Commander Koenig (a miscast Martin Landau), having received a "brain scan" to get him back up and running after he went a little silly earlier, sees not friends and family but hideous latex monsters when he sets eyes on the visitors from the "swift." Try as he might to convince Helena (Barbara Bain) and the other Alpha crew members that the visitors are invading aliens and not saviors from Earth, he can’t get anyone to believe him. Finally he manages to talk his shapeshifter friend Maya into undergoing the "brain scan," which gets her seeing the monsters, too. She assumes the form of one and tries to infiltrate them - fruitlessly, it turns out, but she does learn that they are a species who feed on radiation.

In the interest of rustling up some fare the aliens have fiddled with the Alpha crews’ minds to scam them into setting off a nuclear explosion. Commander Koenig quashes the aliens with a few well-selected fistfights and in the end the moon is free to zigzag through space unmolested.

My view of the 70s has changed fundamentally since I revisited Space: 1999. Its forecast of the future are astoundingly clunky and primordial: the moonbase ís state-of-the-art medical wing looks like a silly Jiffy Lube, peppered with oscilloscopes and blinky, buttony science fair school projects, and the bases intercom is a black-and-white, closed-circuit video network much like the anti-shoplifting surveillance systems you still find in small liquor stores and pawnshops. They do have something that looks a bit like 3 1/4-inch floppy disks - which puts them above Rollerball (one cheesier classic of those days) in terms of accurateness, the latter film prognosticating reams of punch cards for the 21st century.

Outside of this, though, Destination Moonbase - Alpha provides more hysterical than prophetic insight for the viewer in the late 90s or the current 2000s. The show’s closing point - that real life, no matter how mind-numbing, is preferable to fantasy, no matter how heavenly - is particularly old-world.

In an era of creative revelation, it must have seemed natural to imagine that a future utopia would give supreme value to objective reality. Little did those TV writers of the 70s know that these out of date notions, far from enjoying a comeback, would be further damaged in the succeeding thirty years by social construction, deconstruction, and assorted other theories holding everyday reality to be just as fragile as the nice dreams the aliens offer the Alpha crew. But then again, it is easy enough for me to say this - retrospection, after all, is twenty-twenty.

Besides, Destination Moonbase-Alpha’s opening Star Wars like homage actually sets the film in the year 2100 , so maybe there is still a little time for impartiality to come back into favor and vindicate Space: 1999’s currently out-of-vogue traditionalist loyalties. Gentlemen (and ladies): place your bets now!

Thursday, April 19, 2012

All right, so, erm, here I am, back again. This feels exceeding weird after such a long absence and I'm not quite sure I remember all the things to do...

I had a lot of travel to do – mostly work, very little leisure besides a very complex functional portal re-design for a client that was all ready to go up, but as usual, I'm not as satisfied with it as I was nearly three months ago. And I need to bring all the other things at office into line.... Sheesh, so much to do.

With almost all my Music uploads now dead and all the SOPA talk, I was also planning on moving the blog to Tumblr or on my own company server (as a pal strongly recommended), but I'm not sure about that at the moment, either.
I wasn't even sure it was a good idea to throw myself back into the internet, considering some of the recent problems which have come out of it, seductive, nasty thing that it can be. Don’t ask me what?

And I would have been here a lot sooner if not for the problems with my internet provider - perpetual buffering, intermittent connectivity and long periods of complete internet paralysis! Those lovely and stupid folks. It took them a long 20 days to get my 2 MBPS net line working after their so called upgrade, which could not be scheduled until yesterday (because of some more bull shit antivirus upgrade and all that).

It seems to me that it's simply not that complex a thing to attach a waveform meter to a live line and see what it says is non-functional. I mean, seriously, I'm no hardcore tech and I could do it if someone gave me the meter!

So, after maybe some 30 increasingly irate phone calls and maybe 3 lawsuit inspiring emails, and two specific angry phone calls to their local head, much threatening and subdued yowling, someone finally sent a freakin' web technician out here this morning and tested my freakin' internet line.
"Ah, bad filter. I have one. No problem." Arrrgghh! I now join the ranks of those who loudly proclaim: my net provider sucks! So much for all the 21st century modern technology talk…

Think of this blog as an alternative to your regular mainstream entertainment source. For most bloggers, writers and journalists after the blood, sweat and tears all they have is a paycheck at the end of the day but here, we have something better, our passion. Read on and you'll agree why this blog is different! And remember to like the Websnacker on Facebook and follow on Twitter!